Industrial History: Tanneries and Pollution of the Aberjona River
Since the early 1700s, the valley of the Aberjona River has been the home of dozens of tanneries and piggeries. The Riley Tannery and a few others were the only ones to economically survive into the middle of the 20th century. Piggeries existed in the area of wells G and H even in the 1960s.
The black and white photographs below came from part of the 1922 Pollution Survey of the Aberjona River conducted by the Division of Fisheries & Wildlife in Westboro, Massachusetts (Massachusetts 1922 ). The photographic report contains 170 annotated photographs from the 1921-1922 field surveys that document the extensive pollution of the Aberjona River. The color photographs came from the M.S. thesis of Fred DeFeo, an engineering student at Tufts University (DeFeo, 1971 ).
What these photographs show is typical of land usage prior to environmental awakening in the 1970s. What the photographs imply is the the quality of water flowing in the Aberjona River when municipal wells G and H were operating was anything but pristine.
Pollution along the Aberjona River
Tanneries in northern Woburn
Piggeries along floodplain of the Aberjona River
